


Between Flesh and What's Fantasy

by djarum99



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-18
Updated: 2010-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 00:36:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/djarum99/pseuds/djarum99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A flashback follow-up to <a href="http://djarum99.livejournal.com/49922.html#cutid1/">Birds of Prey</a>, J/E in 1970's New Orleans, mud wrestling, and a nod to Mr. Springsteen. I love that song - no one writes street lyrics like the Boss :-) Written in response to <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/hseas_challenge/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/hseas_challenge/"><b>hseas_challenge</b></a> prompt number 5 - "brave new worlds" (aka future fic), and for everyone whose heart has been lost to the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Flesh and What's Fantasy

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Current location:** |  [saturday](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=saturday)  
---|---  
**Current mood:** |   
energetic  
**Current music:** | Everlast - Saving Grace  
**Entry tags:** |   
[fic](http://djarum99.livejournal.com/tag/fic), [hseas_challenge](http://djarum99.livejournal.com/tag/hseas_challenge), [j/e](http://djarum99.livejournal.com/tag/j/e), [post-awe](http://djarum99.livejournal.com/tag/post-awe)  
  
  
_**Fic: Between Flesh and What's Fantasy**_  
**Title:** _Between Flesh and What's Fantasy_  
**Rating:** N17  
**Pairing:** J/E   
**Disclaimer:** Disney owns, I make no profit

 

 

The Big Easy is a paradise where no man feels unwanted, though Jack grumbles that it's no match for Tortuga, and claims that he misses the smell. Elizabeth does not, revelling in denim abandom, twentieth century hygiene, and the Quarter's languid laissez-faire. Potent, heady freedom, to wear lace again if she chooses, to sail as a woman unbound. She knows Jack grieves for more than rough streets and blackstrap rum, but they speak of joys past only when the moon hangs crescent thin, and only in each other's arms, only on the sea.

The trick of living forever lies in shedding one's skin, and in never sailing alone.

_They run..._

Europe, Malaysia, India, Egypt, Nassau port - once more they had come full circle, dropped anchor for a week, stayed six and a day too long. Jack had run afoul of an extra ace and a flint-eyed bayou shark, unfortunately a man with well armed friends and a habit of rapid vengeance. They run, though their languid pace belies all danger. The risk is discovery rather than bullets and this riverbank night crawls slow, sidles thick through open doorways, drapes heat like Spanish moss.

Bourbon Street wails tomcat blues, and Jack Sparrow loves the prowl.

The dancer's switchblade fingers carve a smoky bourbon haze, a gris-gris Doctor mutters hoodoo and the bartenders draw down - hurricanes, straight bourbon, sazeracs and cheap cold beer. Jack wraps her tight, back to belly, and Elizabeth rolls her hips, sways, arches back to find his mouth. The gantry holds a mirror, reflecting this restless decade's façade; she wears silk and summer's bronze, the man behind her a stranger's face and a pirate's laughing eyes. Sans beads and braids and shine, he's still the man she met the day he took her from the water, but death's defeat has granted him moments of peace. She likes him that way, quiet, still, but it never lasts for long.

"I want you..."

"At sunrise, on the sea."

_They run..._

Jack is still the man he's always been, though immortality claims a toll for fear in sorrow's heavy coin. He's has taught her how to lift that purse, to take joy in each new sunrise and leave time's harbourmaster wanting. If she isn't the woman she used to be, that change wasn't wrought by the Fountain; metamorphosis began in a chrysalis sea, on a nameless island with no truth at all, when first she met a pirate.

They stumble free of the music and Jack stands scenting the breeze, head back, throat bared, casting for the quick of the night. She likes him this way, lean, hungry, comrade to the wolf.

"I know just the place, Lizzie, for a final night of dissipation. Passed this way a week ago, or three, and found something new under this fair city's sun - you'll like it."

"It's in the wrong direction."

"It's just past sunset, we can't sail until dawn, and there is no wrong direction, love. Trust me."

"Sail" means diesel engines, and "trust me" bodes of folly, but she follows him anyway as she often does down an avenue of masks and sin. Sin of every description, spilling exultant from every doorway, glittering in the eyes of sunburned tourists and the brass of tinselled bars. Jack weaves upriver, past Dumaine's Café-Lafitte, past wild St. Ann and bold St. Peter, the patron streets of strip clubs and men who turn to watch his swagger. Jack's grin still carries gold, an affectation he refuses to yield, and he favours a few with its magic, leaves a trailing wake of sighs.

"Hussy."

"What? No harm done, and why neglect admiration when it lifts its yearning head? Metaphorically speaking, more or less. In the case of the last gent, rather less. Ah. Here we are."

He draws her into pandemonium, a gathering to make the goat god proud - the crush surges, ebbs and flows, a churning mass of bodies that threatens to swallow them whole. Jack tightens his grip on her wrist, and plunges forward. They reach the bouncer's sheltered corner, money changes hands and she's hoisted to a bar top, Jack panting at her side.

"See? Mud."

His voice carries satisfaction, a cicerone's velvet warm at her ear above the raucous din. Mud, knee deep in a great inflated plastic tub, the knees in question belonging to warriors clad in nothing but viscous sludge.

"They're...wrestling? In mud."

"Glorious, yes? Very Greek."

"Very American."

They are older than this country, older than the boards beneath their feet.

Eternity has proven dynamic, change a matter of cunning in triumphant league with fate. Human power, wealth and prospects leap forward in heartbeats, but human wisdom follows slow. Still, there's something to be said for their outlander's perspective, for wisdom's halting progress, for drinking rum in delta bars.

Jack passes her the bottle, sweet Haitian gold, and she drinks deep, settles into his shoulder. His hand slides beneath her shirt, stroking lazy circles as musicians summon _Brother John_, choreograph the battle's rhythm, a swampy fool's ballet. There's something childlike in it, beneath the muck and the voyeur's thrill, something artless in the wrestler's abandon and the pleasure in Jack's eyes. She likes him this way, but she's restless, longs to escape the crowd, this city, to share the night with him alone.

Two hundred years, and she's shattered on love's perilous rocks too many times to count, with Jack, with the _Dutchman's_ captain. The art they craft from the remnants is all they are and will be, the only treasure she would kill for, the only prize they've never lost.

"Watch, Bess, it's almost over. The match, not the evening. I've a yen to commit the oldest of sins in the newest kind of ways..." He nips an earlobe, tongues the nape of her neck, and she doesn't doubt the promise, knows that fire still burns bright.

_They run..._

The street is cool with midnight, alive with the bacchanal, and Jack's hired a car, a monstrous thing, stretching sleek in black and chrome. The _Pearl's_ current incarnation awaits in Florida's Keys. Jack talks to her still, tells her of their inland travels, an apologia of sorts for his occasional desertion. Piracy, at the moment, is an earthbound profession, though it has not been so for long. They've run patriot's contraband, the King's blockades, Prohibition's liquor and revolution's arms - commerce is a fickle beast, and fortune will return to the sea.

The limousine boasts leather seats, a luxury they forego, sliding to the floor in a tangle to ride the highway's rush and hum. Deep, soft kisses and her hand beneath his jeans - he's hard, corded satin against her palm, and she opens his shirt, lays him bare.

"Want you now, Bess."

"I want to wait - I want you on the water."

"Too far...please..."

Jack doesn't say it often, and he doesn't need to now, lazing in tawny glory beneath the neon's flash and fade. He had revealed his body's mysteries long ago when surrender was new, bewitching her with their alchemy, with the sight of him undone. She takes him slow, teasing golden conjurations from willing muscle, sculpted bone. Jack grins, smug and breathless - she gave him that truth long ago, relinquishing the secret when it still seemed a risk, years before they drowned death in the Fountain.

_"You're beautiful."_

_"Took you long enough to say it, darlin'."_

_"I've always believed it."_

_"I know."_

He spends hard as they float past Metairie, drowses warm against her shoulder until they breach the airport gates. New Orleans shimmers below, vanishes into twilight as they wing southeast. Flying has long since lost its charm, a necessary evil endured in narrow confines, a beginning and an ending with no joy in the miles between. They sleep until the engines whine and the plane descends from midnight, catch a second flight in Atlanta to reach Key West at dawn. The boardwalk teems with early risers, a swirl of glaring colour beneath the raucous waltz of gulls, too bright, too loud, too close. She remembers a barren fisherman's island, an endless white sand beach, feels weary chains slip free at last when the _Pearl_ arrows clear of the harbour.

"Now, Jack. Please. We're home."

He takes her slow, as morning floods the cabin, a mirrored dance of waves and light and the glide of skin on skin. Jack had stolen her mysteries while revealing his own, a theft she's never had cause to lament. Mouth quirking around a nipple, he smiles as he watches her burn, his eyes dark with want, a predator's focus - she likes him like this, sly and dangerous, intent on her demise. Between her thighs, he opens her with a devil's rough-silk tongue, cradling her hips as she rocks against him, arcing bowstring tight.

"So sweet, your quim. Like honey. Now, love - now."

One final liquid caress and she urges him upward, claims him before it's finished, holds his gaze as he thrusts inside her, fierce and wild and deep. Jack makes it last, takes them to the edge and back until all control eludes him. Slipping a hand between them, he tips the balance, strokes the tender place where their bodies join, carries her with him when he falls.

She loves him like this, unmasked and artless and lost in their magic, the only thing that time can't steal. Aboard this ship, in this bed, on the water, they can make the sun stand still.

_They run..._

[ ](http://www.maploco.com/view.php?id=3142209)   
[](http://www.maploco.com/)


End file.
